CFP: Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation (Studies in Slavonic Cultures)

Deadline for Submissions: March 01, 2017

CALL FOR PAPERS
for Studies in Slavic Cultures XIV
Late Socialism: Second-World Modernity in Global Circulation

This volume of Studies in Slavic Cultures invites contributions that explore the culture of Late Socialism from a transnational perspective. Taken to be the period from the death of Stalin to the beginning of Perestroika (mid-1950s to the mid-1980s), Late Socialism is not merely a transitionary phase between a totalitarian regime and the liberalizations of impending collapse. Rather, it is a period with rich potential to explore the particularity and comparability of second-world modernity in a cross-cultural framework.

This period is marked by increasing international contacts and cross-cultural transfers not only with the Western world, but also with the cultures and subcultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Scholarship on Russo-Soviet culture often oscillates between two overreaching claims. On the one hand, some Slavists interpret Russo-Soviet culture, history, and politics as sui generis, invoking a long tradition of an exceptionalist Russia, as “neither East nor West.” On the other hand, a competing tendency has insisted upon a comparitivist Russia, one in which Russia belongs to the same temporal-spatial modernity as Europe, yet inevitably therefore “backward” on a shared scale of cultural development.

Taking insight from Michael David-Fox’s Crossing Borders, which convincingly deconstructs this binary opposition in favor of an alternative lens “marked by webs of meaning, multicausal explanations, and pluralistic rather than exclusionary interpretive frameworks,” we invite articles that examine the particularities of Late Socialist culture, putting them into diverse geopolitical and cross-cultural constellations.

Possible topics include:

  • “Leftist thought”: Soviet Marxism, Génération ’68, Frankfurt School
  • Socialist “soft power”: interactions between Second and Third World
  • Postcolonial studies, imperialism, and peripheries under Late Socialism
  • The socialist middle class: an anthropology of everyday life and consumer culture
  • The Biopolitics of Late Socialism
  • Comparative histories of theory: Tartu structuralism, Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, etc.
  • Transnational literary influence: Hemingway, Brodsky, Evtushenko/Whitman, Voznesenskii/Goya, etc.
  • Cultural contact zones: international (film) festivals, co-productions, exhibitions
  • Transregional subcultures and countercultures
  • Modernism(s) in global cinema

The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2017. Queries and submissions should be sent to the editors Trevor Wilson and Olga Kim at sisc@pitt.edu .Please visit the following link for detailed submission and formatting guidelines: http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/rules.html .

Studies in Slavic Cultures is a graduate-student journal published by members of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, with support from the Center for Russian and East European Studies. SISC is indexed in ABSEES.